Blair
Anthony Seldon
London: Free Press (Simon & Shuster), 2004, h/b, £20
What a tome! At 755 pages, with 40 chapters and 3000 plus footnotes, the book is neatly divided into chapters on either specific historical periods or significant individuals. The picture that emerges of Blair is striking in its variance from much of his public image but not necessarily to his disadvantage. He is a rather more mundane figure than the PR machine would have us believe.
Early Blair
The PM had no great connection with the Labour Party (his father was a Conservative barrister, widely tipped as likely to get a seat in Parliament before a disabling stroke) and has, arguably, no great connection either with the English or UK way of life, having spent his early childhood in Australia. At university in the 1970s he was a committed Christian and played guitar in a rock band, and ran some undergraduate discos presumably of a fairly harmless nature. He was also much taken with the theories of John MacMurray a 1930s and ’40s philosopher who took an anti-individualist and anti-statist position advocating instead a belief in community. Not much to chew on here, then. Our Leader emerges as being somewhat similar to Cliff Richard.
Blair as careerist
Here considerable changes appear when the machine-issued CV of Blair’s good fortune is checked against the facts. He joined the Labour Party in 1975. By 1979 he was looking for a safe seat in Parliament without having done much of the tiresome business of delivering leaflets, contesting unwinnable wards in local government elections etc etc. He managed to get the support of the EETPU odd given his membership of CND and the hostility towards that organisation at the time from the union’s General Secretary Frank Chapple and attempted and failed to become the Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Middlesborough North and then for Stockton-on-Tees South. Following these disappointments, father-in-law Tony Booth set up a meeting with Tom Pendry MP, who had a girlfriend who was also Secretary of the Beaconsfield Constituency Labour Party and Blair finally got selected as a Labour bye-election candidate in a solid Tory seat, thus fleshing out his otherwise thin CV, meeting some important people (Foot, Healey etc) and making a small number of media appearances.
The hunt now began for a safe Parliamentary seat. Blair had dinner with Giles Radice MP, described here as ‘a leading Labour Party figure in the North East’,(1) who suggested that he obtain the backing of a powerful trade union. Seldon says that Radice recommended Blair to the TGWU, who were anxious to find a candidate to stop Les Huckfield winning the selection in Sedgefield, the last safe Labour seat in the North East, an area where the GMB had a significant role. Blair managed to obtain a crucial ward nomination to bolster and add credibility to the trade union branches who were already supporting him. At the final selection meeting questions that had actually been drafted by Moss Evans, the General Secretary of the TGWU, were planted in the audience and asked with the object of rattling Huckfield. It worked. Blair was selected and duly elected in 1983.
Commits to the USA
His potential was spotted early on most notably by the US Embassy. In 1986 Blair went on a month’s free tour of the US, paid for by the State Department. (2) Having been given a significant front bench role by Kinnock the real architect of the hard work of changing the Labour Party Blair was most disappointed at the 1992 General Election result. His reaction to it is described in some detail by Seldon. Strikingly, Blair does not appear to have understood the very basic political point arising from the role played by the SDP in both 1983 and 1987 elections. (For all their chatter about ‘mould breaking’ and the centre ground, the effect of the SDP was utterly divisive and destructive.) The splitting of the anti-Tory vote on these two occasions was so significant that no political party, under even brilliant leadership, could have gone from where Labour was in 1983 to forming a minority government in less than 12 years. It simply wasn’t possible in a first-past-the-post system. This would be an elementary consideration, of course, to anyone who had been a lowly ward organiser or similar.
Blair was promoted by the new leader, John Smith, but quickly began intriguing against him. Seldon’s book offers a valuable account of this episode. In the Smith world view basically a centre-right, pro-US, Dennis Healey type view Labour was on target to win power some time in 1996, at the latest, or earlier, if Major’s government collapsed, which seemed imminent at any time from late 1992 onward; and thus further changes in policy and style were not necessary. Blair for his part was ‘fed up’ with Smith, was convinced that ‘Labour couldn’t win’ (or at any rate told people that he thought this was the case), ‘would sooner go back to being a barrister than remain a backbench MP’,(3) and in a speech in the summer of 1992 proclaimed that Labour ‘….should make common cause with other parties around the world in searching out the way forward….’. In other words the Labour Party should be changed radically and should work closely with the US Democrats and the Australian Labour Party but not any of the European left of centre parties.
In January 1993 the British Embassy in Washington DC organised a visit for Blair and Brown. During this they met the Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, who advised them that what the UK really needed was to have control of interest rates set by the Bank of England. They would duly carry out this policy 4 years later.(4) (Did Blair ever think of visiting the EU in this way? Or taking advice if he did?) In April 1993 he attended the Bilderberg Group meeting in Athens.
Throughout 1993 and early 1994 Blair was a member of a group that sought to make further changes to the Labour Party and replace John Smith as Leader. The other members of this group, who unilaterally proclaimed themselves ‘modernisers’ were Peter Mandelson, Margaret Hodge, John Carr,(5) Jack Dromey and Sally Morgan. This was the nucleus of ‘The Project’, the Blair agenda that would eventually result in Britain having two large, and by European standards, centre-right parties dominating its domestic politics.
The death of John Smith in May 1994 did not mean that Labour became suddenly able to win the following general election (they were already on target to do so). But it did mean that an interesting and probably destructive challenge against his leadership did not have to be mounted. Seldon points out that for the contest to replace the deceased Smith, the Blair campaign had at its disposal up to ten times the money that other candidates could mobilise. Lord Levy organised this.
The centre ground
Between 1994 and 1997 Blair engaged in a great many discussions with Roy Jenkins and Paddy Ashdown about political arrangements post-John Major. This culminated in him telling Jenkins in April 1996 that if Labour won a majority he would form a Coalition Government. Did he mean this? Surely the reverse was true. Jenkins, Ashdown and the Lib-Dems were strung along for a couple of years with promises of involvement, electoral reform, none of which came to fruition. etc. At the other end of the spectrum Blair was anxious to be seen to take advice from Margaret Thatcher in the early years of his premiership. No such involvement was offered to previous senior Labour Party figures. The point is tellingly made that Blair is very much a successor to Thatcher. In the field of personal beliefs a convincing case is made by Seldon for Blair being a moral individual. His relationship with God, though, is totally personal rather like Ian Paisley without the bombast. Neither the Pope nor the Archbishop of Canterbury have been able to make much headway against Blair’s certainty in his own judgement.
The real PM
Seldon investigates at some length the Blair-Brown relationship. A repeated view in this book is that ‘the deal’ between them was that Brown could run UK domestic affairs the economy and all that flows from that, the things Blair knew little about and had relatively little interest in while Blair showboated on the international stage, set the tone for major national initiatives and concentrated on further changes to the Labour Party. Seldon argues that Blair ceded huge amounts of control to Brown who, in turn, handed it over to unelected Treasury officials. (6) In doing this Blair seems to have believed that Brown knew a lot about economics. There is no evidence of this. Brown has three university degrees in history. Certainly the Brown Premiership so far has been marked by copying US ideas (but none from Europe), most of which turn out to have no particular relevance to the UK, or to require more money to implement than was originally envisaged. In addition, Brown, Balls et al let unelected Treasury officials determine whole swathes of UK domestic policy railways, housing, defence etc. most of which duly imploded. Usually when this happens the Blair Presidency takes over running the issue concerned (via a ‘No 10 summit’) and as a result Brown becomes grumpy for a while. Hence the much hyped media line that they are deadly rivals. There is little truth in this, Seldon concludes. The problem for both Brown and Blair is that the rest of Europe spends on average 46% of GDP on public services. The UK spends 39%, the USA 30%.
What is not clearly articulated in this book is the world view that Brown, Blair and the various other UK politicians like them follow. This appears to be the same as the outlook many demoralised US and Australian leftists and centre-leftists adopted in the ’80s after the seemingly invincible triumph of the Reagan-Thatcher agenda. Namely:
- Support of the middle classes is critical at every level. Therefore direct personal taxes can never be raised.
- The media are too powerful to challenge. Therefore flatter them, give them good stories (‘briefing’, ‘spinning’ etc ) and allow them a deregulated area in the market place in which to work.
- If you either need to or want to pay for additional domestic projects because of (1) you can only do so by increasing the amount of cheap foreign labour within the domestic economy (in the USA, Hispanics; in the UK anyone in the world ) and as the working population goes up and costs got down, so the amounts of taxes coming in from low wage jobs goes up.
- Anything other than this is impossible and should be resisted.
It is striking that the tribulations that Blair and Brown have with Europe stem from this approach. (Thanks to their electoral arrangements, Europe did not have majority governments that implemented the Reagan-Thatcher policies.)
Generally one senses, when the narrative concludes in mid 2004, that we have not seen the end of the Blair years by a long chalk.
A valuable work.
Notes
1 Yes and actually head of political research for the GMB before becoming MP for Durham (Chester-le-Street).
2 I am struck here by the absence of any similar programme which could take keen young MPs around the EU and show them what high investment in public services can achieve.
3 Did he tell his supporters in Sedgefield this?
4 The effect of this was that UK interest rates were higher than the EU good for those who trade on the money markets in NY and London.
5 Husband of Baroness Thornton.
6 Neither Blair nor Brown seem to be aware of the destructive role the Treasury have pursued in the UK in the last 50 years, particularly by having a curious definition of what constitutes public spending and what governments ought to be allowed to do.